What Happened to Mint? The Rise and Fall of America's Budgeting App

If you’re one of the millions of people who used Mint to track spending, manage budgets, and monitor debt, you already know: Mint is gone. Intuit shut it down in March 2024 and directed users to migrate to Credit Karma. After 17 years as arguably the most well-known personal finance app in America, Mint simply stopped existing.

Here’s what happened, why Intuit killed it, and what you should use instead for debt tracking.

The Rise of Mint

Mint launched in 2006 and quickly became the default answer to “what app should I use to track my money?” The premise was simple and powerful: connect your bank accounts, credit cards, and loans, and Mint would automatically categorize your transactions, show you where your money went, and help you create a budget.

It was free. It was comprehensive. And at its peak around 2016, it had roughly 20 million active users. For an entire generation of people, Mint was their first introduction to personal finance management software.

Intuit acquired Mint in 2009 for $170 million, adding it to a portfolio that included TurboTax and QuickBooks. At the time, it seemed like a perfect fit — Intuit got a massive user base of financially engaged consumers, and Mint got the resources of a large corporation.

The Slow Decline

Mint’s problems didn’t start suddenly. They accumulated over years.

The Bank Connection Problem

Mint relied on data aggregation to pull transactions from your bank accounts. In the early days, this often worked through screen-scraping — essentially logging into your bank’s website on your behalf and reading the data. As banks tightened security (requiring multi-factor authentication, implementing bot detection, switching to OAuth), these connections broke. Frequently.

Mint’s bank connection issues became legendary. Users would log in to find half their accounts disconnected. Reconnecting required re-entering credentials, sometimes multiple times. Transactions would be delayed or missing. The app’s core promise — “see all your finances in one place” — became unreliable.

The fix for this was migrating to modern APIs (like Plaid), but that cost money and took development resources. Intuit invested in this, but never fast enough to keep up with the breakage.

The Revenue Problem

Mint was free to users. It made money through:

1. Affiliate offers. Mint showed you credit card offers, savings account recommendations, and other financial products. If you clicked through and signed up, Mint earned a commission.
2. Advertising. Display ads throughout the app.

This created a fundamental tension: Mint’s revenue came from selling you financial products, while its value proposition was helping you manage your finances better. A budgeting app that recommends you open a new credit card is working at cross-purposes with a user who’s trying to pay off credit card debt.

More importantly, the revenue per user was low. Data aggregation costs were rising. The math stopped working. Maintaining Mint’s infrastructure for millions of users who generated modest ad and affiliate revenue wasn’t profitable enough to justify the engineering effort.

The Engagement Decline

Active users dropped from roughly 20 million at peak to an estimated 3.6 million by 2021. The broken bank connections eroded trust. The ads and product recommendations cluttered the experience. Newer apps like YNAB, Monarch Money, and Copilot offered better user experiences without the baggage.

Users who stuck with Mint increasingly found that the categorization was wrong, transactions were duplicated or missing, and the budgeting tools hadn’t meaningfully improved in years. The product felt neglected — because, increasingly, it was.

Why Intuit Killed It

Intuit didn’t shut Mint down because it had no users. Millions of people still logged in. It shut Mint down because Mint no longer served Intuit’s business strategy.

Credit Karma was the replacement. Intuit acquired Credit Karma in 2020 for $7.1 billion — over 40 times what they paid for Mint. Credit Karma’s business model (recommending financial products based on your credit profile) was more profitable and more aligned with Intuit’s strategy of driving consumers toward high-margin financial products. Intuit decided to fold Mint’s functionality into Credit Karma rather than maintain two consumer finance platforms.

The consolidation logic: One engineering team instead of two. One user base instead of two. One product to invest in instead of splitting resources. From Intuit’s perspective, it was a straightforward business decision.

From users’ perspective, it was a mess. Credit Karma is a credit monitoring and financial product recommendation platform. It’s not a budgeting app. The features Mint users relied on most — transaction categorization, budget tracking, spending analysis — either didn’t exist in Credit Karma or were significantly reduced. The migration wasn’t a lateral move. It was a downgrade for anyone who used Mint primarily for budgeting or debt tracking.

What Happened to User Data

When Mint shut down, users were given a window to migrate their data to Credit Karma or download it. Those who didn’t act in time lost access to their transaction history and budgets. For people who had years of financial history in Mint, this was genuinely painful.

The migration to Credit Karma preserved some data but not the full experience. Budget configurations, custom categories, and the specific way people had organized their financial tracking were largely lost in the transition.

This is worth remembering when you choose any financial tool: your data portability depends entirely on the company’s willingness to let you take it with you. Mint, to its credit, offered export options. But the exported data was raw — recreating your budgets and tracking in a new tool required significant manual work.

The Lessons

Lesson 1: Free Doesn’t Mean Forever

Mint’s free model attracted tens of millions of users but created a business that couldn’t sustain itself. When the parent company found a more profitable direction, the free product was sacrificed. The users who relied on Mint had no leverage — they weren’t paying customers, so their needs weren’t the priority when business decisions were made.

This doesn’t mean you should avoid free tools. But understand that a free tool’s longevity depends on the company’s ability and willingness to keep it free. A company with a clear, sustainable revenue model (subscriptions, one-time purchases) has more aligned incentives with its users than one running on ads and affiliate commissions.

Lesson 2: Data Aggregation Is Fragile

Mint’s most persistent problem — broken bank connections — isn’t unique to Mint. It’s inherent to the data aggregation model. Every app that relies on pulling data from your bank through a third-party aggregator faces the same challenge: banks change their security, aggregators play catch-up, and connections break in the meantime.

This is why manual-entry debt apps have a reliability advantage. They don’t depend on the ongoing cooperation between your bank and a data aggregator. The tradeoff is more effort from you, but the data is always available and always accurate.

Lesson 3: Product Neglect Is Visible

Mint showed signs of neglect for years before the shutdown. The interface stopped evolving. Bank connections broke more often and got fixed more slowly. User feedback went unanswered. If you’re using a financial app and you notice these patterns — stale development, unresponsive support, unchanged UI — it’s worth having a backup plan.

We’ve noted similar patterns with Honeydue, for what it’s worth. When a financial app goes quiet, the clock may be ticking.

Lesson 4: Don’t Build Your Financial Life on One Tool

The people most affected by Mint’s shutdown were those who used it as their sole financial tracking system. They had no backup, no parallel records, and no easy migration path. Starting over in a new app after years of data in Mint was a significant setback.

Keep your own records. Export your data periodically. Know your debts, balances, and rates independently of any app. A tool should supplement your financial awareness, not be the only place it exists.

What to Use Instead for Debt Tracking

If you used Mint to track debt and you’re looking for a replacement, your best option depends on what you actually need:

If You Mainly Tracked Debt Payoff

You need a dedicated debt payoff tool, not a general budgeting app:

• Ascent — 9 payoff strategies, privacy-first, couples features. iOS, $29.99 one-time.
• Debt Payoff Planner — Simple and effective mobile tracker. iOS and Android, free tier available.
• Undebt.it — Free web-based planner with 8 strategies. No account required to start.

These do the debt payoff planning part better than Mint ever did. Mint showed you your balances; these apps show you a strategy and a timeline.

If You Mainly Used Mint for Budgeting

For the full budgeting experience Mint provided:

• YNAB — The gold standard for budgeting. $14.99/month. Steeper learning curve but more effective methodology.
• Monarch Money — The closest Mint replacement in terms of feature set. $14.99/month. Bank syncing, budgets, debt tracking, clean interface.
• Goodbudget — Envelope budgeting for people who want a simpler approach. Free tier available.

If You Want the Simplest Possible Transition

Use our free calculators to immediately see your debt payoff timeline. No account, no setup, no migration. Enter your debts, compare strategies, and decide if you need a full app from there.

The Bigger Picture

Mint’s death and Tally’s shutdown in the same year sent a clear message to anyone paying attention: large, well-known finance apps can disappear without much warning. The era of assuming that a popular app with millions of users will stick around indefinitely is over.

When choosing financial tools, think about durability. How does the company make money? What happens to your data if the company goes away? How dependent are you on this single tool? The answers to these questions matter more than feature lists or brand recognition.

Your debt payoff plan should survive any app. Build it on tools you trust, keep your own records, and make sure you always know your numbers — with or without an app.